It is probably more appropriate to speak of the producer’s influence in this particular case, but since the producer is also the director, the line is admittedly blurry. As a director, Brian Desmond Hurst enjoys a lofty status in the history of cinema in his homeland of North Ireland. There is a sound stage named in his honor in Belfast and Hurst was posthumously honored by the Director’s Guild of Great Britain. Despite this, he does not exactly enjoy a reputation as of cinema’s great innovators nor is there any specific “Hurst touch” with which his films can be readily identified. Nevertheless, he put his stamp on the 1951 adaptation of A Christmas Carol (originally released only in England under the title Scrooge) firmly enough to make it a version of the familiar tale no one had ever seen to the point.
Even today, after more versions of the Dickens Christmas classic has been released than can be counted, the 1951 production gets serious consideration as the best of all time. The impact is likely lost on modern viewers used to dark portrayals of Scrooge and his trek toward redemption. By 1951, however, the most recent film version was thirteen years old and notable for its light treatment with liberal doses of humor. Hurst set out to make the definitive version of A Christmas Carol and that meant not shying away from the grim realities of life in Victorian London as well as creating an easily understood linear progression of Scrooge from a normal young man with a love for Christmas into the miserly old crone whom the Spirits visit.
The result was a film of decidedly mixed reception. British audiences flocked to it. American audiences went shopping instead. Many critics lauded the far more faithful portrayal of the darker edges of the original story while others complained that the much darker tone and uncompromising portrait of a man’s descent into his own personal hell of his making merely sucked the life out of what is supposed to be, after all, an uplifting story by the end. Both the positive and negative reviews had much to do with the single greatest influence Hurst wielded over the production.
The running time of the 1938 version is 69 minutes, shorter than the average theatrical feature by far. By contrast, this version runs nearly twenty minutes longer. A bare-bones, stripped-down summary of the plot would reveal essentially no difference between the stories they tell. But with those twenty extra minutes, Hurst filled in details missing from the earlier films, deepened the emotion intensity of Scrooge losing both his beloved sister and his betrothed. And, by introducing the brand new character of Mr. Jorkin, the film is even able to fill in a notable gap in the story as written by Dickens. Jorkin is Mephistophelean figure who seduces both Scrooge and Marley over to the dark side and away from the benevolent influence of Fezziwig.
As both director and producer, ultimately the projected running time for the film—which is much closer to the average than the previous film—would primarily have been a decision made by Hurst. Whether one loves or hates the result of the consequences of adding twenty minutes more of story than its most immediate predecessor, it is impossible to deny that the 1951 is much more faithful to the spirit and letter of the original source than any previous film adaptation and that is even with the character invented especially for the movie as well as whether it is titled Scrooge or A Christmas Carol.
